Open Democracy has just published a my piece on Trump, Putin, climate change and the EU (the connection is perhaps not blindingly obvious – I hope that list of items has piqued your curiosity. You can read more here). Continue reading →

The Trump-Putin connection can seem just a lurid sideshow in Trump’s horrific circus of racial and religious profiling, misogyny and authoritarianism. And, when that special relationship does catch our attention, the most obvious thing linking the two men (possible videos and blackmail aside) is their common political language of aggressive nationalism.

But this is no sideshow, and much as Trump would like it to be all about him, it is not his personal foible: the agendas of the Republican Party’s petro-backers coincide perfectly with those of the Russian oligarchy, and that is why Trump’s links to Russia were tolerated even before he was elected. The nationalist postures of Trump and Putin, which might seem to be simply ways of rallying some segments of the aggrieved masses to the banners of the countries’ respective caudillos, are instrumental for reshaping the international order in a way favourable to the oil interests.

The overriding need of the oil interests is to block anything that would cut the demand for oil – which is to say, to stymie any serious steps to mitigate climate change. International cooperation is necessary to fight climate change, and aggrieved nationalism undermines international cooperation. The cohesion of the EU is particularly important for international action on climate, and so European integration has become the enemy not only of Moscow, but also of Republican Washington.

I was talking earlier today with a colleague who runs a masters degree on Climate Change Management. Their enrollments have fallen. She attributes this to a “change in the discourse on climate change”, which has rendered the very term a downer, to be avoided (she and her colleagues had thought the degree’s name was pretty upbeat, because “management” suggested… hey, it’s a problem, but we can manage it: not enough, it seems). She contrasted the public attention to the Copenhagen meetings a few years ago, to the relative silence on Paris today. And this of course comes in the midst of an increasingly clear picture of the disaster we’re walking into. If your attention has been elsewhere of late, consider these tidbits:

Kevin Anderson tells us that all the IPCC scenarios that offer at least a 50% chance of staying below 2 degrees depend either on negative emissions technologies that don’t exist yet, or on emissions peaking by 2010 (hint: that didn’t happen). It’s a short and readable piece in Nature Geoscience. Continue reading →